But 300 didn't just spring to life on the big-screen. For its origins as a cinematic adventure which looks and sounds the way it does, we have to go back, not necessarily all the way to Ancient Sparta ...

Leaving neither monuments nor epics, Sparta’s enduring legacy is a military ideal, embodied in Leonidas, hero of Thermopylae, commemorated here in a statue in the modern city of Sparta in Greece.

Furious, Xerxes threatens to not just kill Leonidas and his men, but kill their memories, wiping out all records of Sparta from existence and burning every piece of parchment that mentions them ...

Leonidas of Rhodes is our guide to the Olympic ... The first woman to win an event - as a trainer that is - was Cynisca of Sparta. She won the four-horse chariot race with her team in two ...